A lightweight continuous authentication scheme for medical wireless body area networks

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile medical systems based on wireless body area networks (WBAN) have aroused extensive attention. Wearable wireless medical devices have emerged to meet the demand for high-quality medical services that brought great convenience to people’s lives. However, attackers pose a latent threat to users’ medical information privacy, and identity is easy to leak due to wireless networks’ openness. It can be seen that the authentication phase is a vital part. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight continuous authentication protocol in medical WBAN environments. Our protocol overcomes the shortcomings of sensor node impersonation attack by using physiological signals, cutting energy consumption by using lightweight technology, saving time and energy by reducing computation complexity, and ensuring the current sensor node is the original one through continuous authentication. Finally, our performance analysis has shown that our protocol is provided with the superiority of lightweight, mutuality, low cost. It has a considerable application prospect in medical WBAN.